Rock Me, Baby

The paper lists and classifies musical phenomena, and then analyses the musical atmosphere in three recent novels of Croatian YA literature: The Band (Bend, 1999) by Silvano Simčić, Yellow Minute: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fable (Žuta minuta: rock’n’roll bajka, 2005) by Darko Macan and The Ice Creams (The Sladoleds, 2019) by Miljenko Muršić. All three novels have a rock-and-roll theme, they all follow the life and growth of boys for whom rock music is extremely important in their formative years. The age difference between the three boys is approximately two years: Muršić’s hero Miran is 14 years old, Macan’s protagonist Yellow (Žuti) is 16 years old, and Simčić’s main character celebrates his eighteenth birthday near the end of the novel. Given that the heroes are of different ages, the author’s approach is different in all of them, and they are intended for different audiences. The chronotope of the novel is also different: In the novel The Ice Creams the characters are gathered around the band of the same name live in an unnamed city; in Macan’s novel, the band The Deaf Swallows (Gluhe laste) plays in a club named The Shed (Shoopa) in Novi Zagreb (New Zagreb); and the main character of Silvano Simčić’s teenage story is a young rocker, Vudi, who dreams of forming a band and briefly started Happy Dead People (Sretni mrtvaci) in Rijeka in the early 1980s, which at the time was a real rock capital. The referentiality of the three novels is based on the names of well-known rock bands, solo musicians and songs, Croatian and foreign, then iconic world locations associated with rock, among others. The numerous interferences of literature and music have been pointed out by intermedial studies, primarily a very detailed model by Werner Wolf. Due to the variety of musical references in the novels, we are talking about three different novelistic genres: a novel of performance (The Ice Creams); a novel of music criticism (Yellow Minute); and a musical diary (The Band), which is also a kind of musical memoir prose and a Bildungsroman

Croatian · Fable · HERO · Musical · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Diverse Musicological Studies · Music History and Culture